Palm has just announced a number of changes its webOS development platform that should really be welcomed by developers. They are fully blessing application distribution outside of the App Catalog, open source developers will no longer have to pay a dime to have their applications in the App Catalog, and Palm will also open up all their analytical data for developers to use. Instant update: the official press release is out too.

I think the main advantage of Android over Palm is that anybody can come up with a phone running Android, and google wants that, since they just develop the software. We already have multiple choices of phones running Android, and many more will come soon. While WebOS is only available from Palm, with only two flavors and they are not present in every country. And since they are the ones selling hardware, I don't think we will see any other company selling phones running WebOS...

But I'm really happy to see the current status of the smart-phone scenario. We have Android, Limo, WebOS, Maemo (N900), and a few others (like some phones from motorola) all running Linux! And even iPhone, somewhere really deep inside of it, there is some open-source code there (Darwin/FreeBSD).